Seventy-Eight Percent

Fumino Ozeki · 2012

Forty-four coats of raw urushi, each wiped on, cured four days in a cedar cabinet at seventy-eight percent humidity and cut back with magnolia charcoal; tin powder was dusted into the eleventh coat and again into the thirty-first, so one grey band lies deeper than the other. The last eleven days of work are thumb and tin oxide slurry, which leaves the surface faintly circular under grazing light. The panel is slightly convex, the hemp-wrapped edges blacked, with bengara red left as a hairline where the front face turns.